A new biopic about Tolkien starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins comes across as plausible, tender and, for the most part, extremely watchable

Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings was first published in the mid-Fifties, understandably giving rise to the idea in some quarters that the author had got his inspiration for the endless battles and marauding orcs of Middle-earth from the Second World War.

A new biopic – recently disowned, it must be quickly said, by the Tolkien estate – knocks that notion very firmly on the head. It places the book’s origins 30 years earlier amid the mud, shell holes and carnage of the First World War, the horrors of which John Ronald Reuel Tolkien – now often described as the father of modern fantasy fiction – experienced first-hand.

Whatever the estate’s misgivings (its brief statement did not elaborate), the movie, starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins and directed by Finnish film-maker Dome Karukoski, nevertheless comes across as plausible, tender and, for the most part, extremely watchable.

Tolkien begins in the British trenches of the Somme in 1916, where a possibly traumatised, possibly ill Lieutenant Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) is desperately searching for news of a friend

Anyone who was ever a Tolkien fan – even if only for a few brief teenage years – will find something to interest and enjoy here.

It begins in the British trenches of the Somme in 1916, where a possibly traumatised, possibly ill Lieutenant Tolkien is desperately searching for news of a friend. But, to the despair of his batman, he can’t find the right regiment and the trenches are under constant bombardment.

What follows is a tale of triumph over adversity – Tolkien had lost both his parents and anything resembling family money by the time he was 12 – and of enduring male friendship, with Tolkien winning a scholarship to King Edward’s, Birmingham, where he made the sort of friends you assume are made for life.

Unless, of course, ‘the war to end all wars’ is just around the corner.

I love this section, with the younger Tolkien, already skilled in several languages and knowing his Chaucer by heart, very nicely played by Harry Gilby until Hoult takes over.

When forced to choose between Oxford and his first great love, Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), Tolkien chooses Oxford and consequently we get bogged down in rugger matches

Tolkien becomes firm friends with Robert Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith and Christopher Wiseman. Together they are four impetuous, intelligent boys with a love of tea and cake and a touching desire to ‘change the world through the power of art’.

One of them, of course, in a film not exactly subtle in tracing cause to effect, will. With two of the boys, Tolkien included, hoping to go to Oxford and two to Cambridge, it’s atmospherically reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s great tale of grammar-school success, The History Boys.

At Oxford, the film begins to lose a little traction, despite the best efforts (and they are uniformly good) of Messrs Hoult, Patrick Gibson, Anthony Boyle and Tom Glynn-Carney.

This is partly because we’re very used to the sight of posh white boys in tweed jackets getting drunk in pretty quadrangles and partly because the screenplay, by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, has made its one serious mistake.

When forced to choose between Oxford and his first great love, Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), Tolkien chooses Oxford and consequently we get bogged down in rugger matches, fencing and drunken run-ins with the police.

IT'S A FACT

Tolkien and fellow author CS Lewis once dressed up as polar bears to attend a New Year's Eve party - which wasn't fancy dress.

Meanwhile, as anyone who heard the 2017 Radio 4 drama Tolkien In Love may recall, the real action was taking place in Cheltenham, where Edith, banned from seeing the smitten Tolkien until he was 21, was on the verge of marrying someone else, and Tolkien was desperate to stop her.

Here, however, we see and feel almost nothing of this romantic tension, leaving Collins little to do except flounce out of a teenage high tea and improbably mime her way through Wagner’s Ring.

Despite liberties clearly being taken with the chronology, and the fact that we’re never quite sure whether the war scenes are real or hallucinatory (Tolkien was eventually diagnosed with trench fever), there’s no doubt that the film has a real emotional power, underpinned by the enduring idea that brave men died in the mud of the First World War so that others could live to do great things.

J R R Tolkien did not let his friends down.

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A new biopic about Tolkien comes across as plausible, tender and extremely watchable